Why does UE4 share similar English strings and rely on the string as the ID? This is really difficult for external loc teams such as mine. Similar strings in English may not be the same for contextual reasons as in localized languages.
For example, in the .po and .archive file, not all strings are unique.
Common strings are clumped together to “share” strings with multiple resources.
Here’s a good example of why this is a bad idea for loc.
Simple example:
id1
id2
id3
English “Got 'em”
German “Hab sie”
All the above IDs share the same English string, but in German, they might not have shared meanings.
In English, “Got 'em” could mean “I just picked up some bullets”
…or in English it could mean: “I just shot some aliens”
In English, we can go ahead and share these, sure.
In German, they would not be shared strings, and it would make no sense in one of the contexts, since this is English slang, but UE4 doesn’t know that.
For large titles with many shared strings, this is a nightmare for localization, especially external loc teams who can’t parse the PO or .archive files without hitting this problem. It makes it impossible to bugfix when the context isn’t right in those clumped strings. We’ve had teams create custom tools to convert to XML, using the namespace as a unique ID, and that seemed to work well, but not all devs are willing to put the conversion tools into place, and each dev also seems to have a different setup in UE4. (I work with lots of game devs)
Is there a good way around this? It’s really disappointing to see how much harder loc is with UE4 vs. UE3, with unique string IDs and room for context info. We used to get nice .resx and .json files with UE3.
My team cannot use the PO editor tool.
If there is a good way to convert to XML, my loc team needs training on how! We really prefer exporting to a format that supports parsing/file conversion and context information so we can import into our own loc database. We are required by our company to use our loc database, and it has many benefits and BI that we rely upon, therefore, there really should be a better way to export English content and import loc content via XML or another consistent format with unique, static string IDs, and vice-versa for importing back to UE4. Sad customer right now. Please turn my frown upside down.